Preliminary remarks

Tekst źródłowy

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Preliminary remarks

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AAA

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A variety of texts are presented here, in order to show a tiny percentage of the wealth of Polish Yiddish that has been lost to the world since the events of the Holocaust. Access to research participants was limited. The majority of native speakers of Polish Yiddish are today to be found among the Hasidic communities in New York, Western Europe and Israel. Due to the closed nature of these communities, no speaker from them was interviewed for this project. Instead, secular speakers from the diaspora (Australia, the UK, Belgium) and Israel were interviewed. These interviews could prove problematic - for some speakers, who hadn't spoken Yiddish since childhood, reactivating the language also reactivated their memories of trauma and loss.
Texts were chosen for reading which had some connection with Poland or in one case (Canin) were written using dialects words from Warsaw Yiddish.
Other interviews focused on the life stories of research participants, and how Yiddish formed part of their childhood experience outside of Poland.
Some interviews were concerned with the participants' perceptions of the characteristics of their Yiddish and what exactly made their speech "Polish" Yiddish.
We welcome any comments or additions to the present database. Please make contact on mhornsby@wa.amu.edu.pl
Michael Hornsby
On behalf of the Yiddish Database Team
February 2014